I really enjoy traveling by train.  I can snooze whenever I want.  I can gaze at an endless display of scenery.  I can visit a restroom without delaying the trip.  I don’t have to pack my liquids into tiny containers and put them in a plastic bag.  I can stand up and walk a bit…like to the café car.

One element of train travel though can be a hassle – getting the ticket.

When I lived in Washington, DC, it was pretty easy to use the Amtrak app to see the schedules and buy tickets.  I even collected points which I happily used for more train rides.

When I was in Florence, Italy this summer, my internet research was getting confusing between different rail companies.  But in the station, there were lots of helpful attendants at the kiosks to make sure I was picking the right dates and preferred times, and actual reserved seats.  The next hiccup there was that the kiosk only wanted credit cards with the ‘tap’ feature.  While the United States catches up to the rest of the world in this regard, I scored the win for the ApplePay feature on my phone.

Most recently, I wanted to ride the train in Spain.  I had appreciated the heads up in Italy, that for a little bit more in ticket price you get the assurance of a reserved seat number and avoid the risk of standing or not even getting on the train (?!).  So I looked for this within Spain’s system, and hit a bit of a vocabulary issue.  What was the difference between turista class and preferente class?

This took me on a broader internet search that led me to some other blogs with very useful information:

1. ‘Preferente’ class is the version in Spain that includes a reserved seat.
2. The website and mobile app for the national rail company Renfe, while it avoids the surcharges of distributors, has trouble with foreign credit cards.

This last bit ties to the advice that I want to help spread – if your credit card doesn’t work on the Renfe site, then move along to use a PayPal account.

Some day I expect they will resolve this issue.  But, for my recent effort, neither the site nor the mobile app could complete my transaction when I used my credit card, with little to no insights offered as to why.  Perhaps if I went to the train station I could have replicated the Italian kiosk trick, but I wasn’t anywhere near the train station or even in Spain when I wanted to lock in my plans.  (Much like Amtrak, as seat availability goes down, prices can start to go up, and popular routes can sell out, so as I was sure of my plans, I was motivated to pre-purchase.)  I tried the transaction again with the PayPal option – success!

I hope this quick note can keep frustrations at bay for you too, so you can simply enjoy the ride!

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While you’re here, may as well as look at some train station photos.  Below are from Valencia (Spain), Porto (Portugal), and Milan (Italy).

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